Alessandra Di Maio

Universita' di Palermo

Black Italia: Narrations and Representations of Blacks in Contemporary Italy

2004-2005

Alessandra Di Maio is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Palermo, Italy. She received her Italian doctorate in Comparative Studies and Literary Sciences from the Universities of Bari and Pavia in 1995. She further specialized in the United States, where she first was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and where she taught at different institutions as Assistant Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature. Her area of specialization includes migratory, postcolonial, diasporan and black studies, with a particular attention to how issues of ethnicity, gender, representation, narration, memory and forgetting interact in the formation of national and transnational identities. Among her publications are the volumes Tutuola at The University: The Italian Voice of a Yoruba Ancestor (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000); and the translation and introduction to Nuruddin Farah's Rifugiati (Rome: Meltemi, 2003; original title Yesterday, Tomorrow), which was awarded the Sandro Onofri Prize. Her research at the Italian Academy focuses on the narration and representation of people of African descent in contemporary artistic productions from and about Italy.